I’m
going to do my level best to prevent this from sounding like
a classic-rock anthem, I promise you that. That being said,
I’ve got a hankering for the highway.

It’s not a “long, lonesome highway, east of Omaha”; it is
not the highway on which “I’d swear we were doing 80, when
we saw those motel lights”; it is not the highway on which
folks head out once commanded to “getcher motor running”;
it is most emphatically not the “highway to hell.” And, no,
I don’t want to “head out to the highway, [because] I’ve got
nothin’ to lose at all.”

It’s not an invitation to speed, recklessness or lawlessness,
per se. It’s not a libertine’s highway. It’s not that kind
of highway at all.

Then again, it’s nothing quite so grandly optimistic as Woody
Guthrie’s ribbon beneath a golden skyway. I don’t think the
road was made for you and me, necessarily, or either one of
us, for that matter. It’s no communal passage to greater,
or warm-and-fuzzy, utopian glory. But there it is, that highway,
stretching through a bland, gray landscape over the low hills
at the horizon, leading most likely to nothing better than
more trouble of the sort I’ve experienced on this side of
that rise. Nonetheless, it looks perfect and promising to
me.

It’s the highway of the closing scene of Charlie Chaplin’s
brilliant, hilarious 1936 movie Modern Times, and it’s
one of the most heartening cinematic images I’ve ever seen.
Hand in hand with Paulette Goddard as “the Gamin,” the Little
Tramp—my new hero—waddles off toward that vague promise, bindle
tied to his cane, to weather—well, whatever. (This film is
not coincidentally the last in which Chaplin’s Little Tramp
character would appear, so this “off into the black-and-white
sunset” scene also serves as a sort of knowing meta-farewell.)

Such an ending has become stock symbology for closure. We’re
all familiar with it: It’s the filmic version of “Le Fin”;
in Westerns, where its use is almost ubiquitous, it’s “and
they all lived dustily ever after.” But this one is different:
In Modern Times, our hero and heroine have resolved
little, save that they will travel together. Their dreams
of suburban security have been, at least temporarily, dispelled;
the couple seem so out of step with the highly mechanized
society around them, the viewer must believe those dreams
fanciful to the point of being childishly deluded (the onscreen
representation of that domestic bliss is so fantastic as to
seem more the product of a fevered ad-man’s dream—delectable
fruits willingly winding their vines so as always to be within
arm’s reach—than an obtainable goal). The Tramp and the Gamin
are the refuse of the system; each of them is unsuited by
some quirk of temperament, by some spark of individuality,
to conformity. Though they strive together for a place within
the system—on its assembly lines at the service of its corporate
interests, or in its saloons as clowns for the entertainment
of its consuming classes—the very fact of their togetherness
doubles the possibility of failure. They are doubly individual,
doubly anarchic, doubly unwanted by any but one another. In
the implicit judgment of the portrayed culture, their union
weds weakness to weirdness. They are, horror of horrors, unuseful.

It is a given, therefore, that ultimately they will flee the
metallic hub of society and hie to the outlands, the rougher,
“uncivilized” precincts. So, in its dystopian aspect, the
movie more closely resembles Blade Runner or Brazil
than any Randolph Scott vehicle. But where those movies
present the escape as an acknowledgment of desperation or
defeat, Modern Times is hopeful and accepting.

In Blade Runner, the robot-hunter Decker flees the
city with his Replicant girlfriend to the taunting voice-over
of a coworker, another state-sanctioned predator, “It’s too
bad she won’t live, but, then again, who does?” If that’s
positive, it is so in only an arch and nihilistic way. In
Brazil, the vision is bleaker still: The liberation
effected by Sam, into a lush valley beyond the walls of his
Orwellian city, proves to be imaginary. His escape is from
a hostile and inhumane reality into a kind and accommodating
insanity—as if happiness itself is an impossibility.

As represented by directors Ridley Scott in 1982 and Terry
Gilliam in 1985, conventional notions of post-war happiness—the
plastic happiness of a consumer society—were traps within
a trap: To play along and accept the shallow, material compensations
was to abandon one’s soul; on the other hand, to object, to
abstain, to call attention to oneself was a criminal act that
could not be tolerated by the Machine.

No left turn, no right turn. Do not pass go, do not collect
$200. Hold your place and, for God’s sake, hold your tongue.
These were the messages, it seemed. Motion would make you
a martyr, at best. If, that is, your passing weren’t completely
obscured under piles of 27156789/074328-Ks in the Department
of Information Adjustment’s sub-basement.

At the end of the Depression-era Modern Times, however,
the Tramp and Gamin are neither beaten nor despairing. Rather,
they present a visual testimony of their ability to suffer
and endure: she in her Sunday best, the outfit the one purchase
remaining from better days, he in his tattered, dusty cutaway
and his hobo’s boots—they are presented almost as parentheses
around their experiences within the film, from high to low,
flush to flat.

The highway is before them, but they don’t set out until the
Tramp convinces the Gamin to smile, which comes easily to
her. Then, they’re shuffling off, two amiable anarchists who
give the slip to every trap, knowing the road itself is the
destination—not the bank of lights beckoning, post-show, from
the lobby bar of the Omaha Marriott.